The Second Coming - by Garth Risk Hallberg (Paperback)

About the Book

"When 13-year-old Jolie Aspern drops her phone onto the subway tracks in the springtime of 2011, how can she imagine it might bring her estranged dad, Ethan, crashing back into her life? Ethan is an ex-con and recovering addict who even in his more honest moments has difficulty seeing outside himself. But now he's starting to fear that Jolie's in the kind of trouble her mom, Sarah, could never understand. Convinced that he is the only one who can save her, he decides to offer up for Jolie the whole of his life, its hard-won achievements and most harrowing mistakes - in hope of breaking through. So begins the doubled journey of Jolie and Ethan: child and adult, apart and together, different yet the same. Their story as it unfolds will test Jolie's bond with her grandparents and Ethan's with his sister. It will forge unlikely alliances with a smooth-talking teacher and a doubt-filled probation officer. It will confront father and daughter with the turbulence of youthful romance (Jolie's with a mysterious admirer; Ethan's with Sarah herself). And around each bend, new vistas beckon: from group therapy in recession-era Bellevue to a mid-'90s Howard Johnson on Maryland's Eastern Shore, from the world of fading surf breaks to the heights of the Brooklyn Bridge and beyond. The Second Coming is an utterly timely work of fiction that explores an enduring mystery: whether we can ever really outrun the past, if it's possible to hold onto what anchors us while still chasing something new. Full of compassion, full of music and intimacy-full of blues-this beautifully attuned novel renews the extraordinary promise of this writer's "boundless and unflagging talents" (Michiko Kakutani, New York Times)"--

Book Synopsis

From the New York Times bestselling author of City on Fire, an intimate epic that plunges us deep into the lives of a teenage girl and her father as they navigate love, grief, betrayal, and redemption

"Beautiful and daring." --Nathan Hill, author of Wellness

"Breathtaking." --Christina Baker Kline, author of Orphan Train

When thirteen-year-old Jolie Aspern drops her phone onto the subway tracks in 2011, her estranged dad, Ethan, seems like the furthest thing from her mind. A convicted felon and recovering addict, Ethan has long struggled to see beyond himself. But then a call from New York makes him fear his daughter's in deeper trouble than anyone realizes. And believing he's the only one who can save her, he decides to return home.

So begins the journey that will, in time, push Jolie and Ethan--child and adult, apart and together, different yet the same--out past their depths.

Full of yearning and revelation, The Second Coming is at once an incandescent feat of storytelling and an exploration of an enduring mystery: Can the people we love ever really change?

Review Quotes

"A gritty epic about a teen girl in trouble and her estranged father looking for a second chance." --Boston Globe

"Dazzling . . . Heartfelt . . . The dance of life and death between these two characters, father and child, is the heart and soul of this book, a complex, moving, insanely passionate, frightening, and weirdly hopeful story of 'I can't quit you' . . . Hallberg is a smart and talented writer who likes to take risks." --Helen Schulman, Air Mail

"Hallberg's novel takes its place in a lineage [with] Don DeLillo's 1997 epic Underworld and Jonathan Franzen's densely woven family dramas . . . It's a big, attractively baroque construction." --Wall Street Journal

"The tale of two vivid, damaged characters . . . Full of brilliant writing . . . It races down avenues of sparkling prose . . . He treats us to one absolute cracker of an observation after another." --Irish Times

"Exuberantly inventive . . . The author's spot-on wit remains playfully evident." --Thomas Mallon, The New Yorker

"Reading Garth Risk Hallberg is a constant delightful surprise--you never know what's coming next: a gorgeous turn of phrase, a perfect pop culture reference, a brilliant new observation, a jaw-dropping plot twist. And all of these gifts are on full display in The Second Coming, a story about a father bound up by his mistakes, a daughter bound up in her silence, and a family in need of saving. It's a beautiful and daring novel, as inventive as it is breathtaking." --Nathan Hill, author of Wellness

"Hallberg's a born wordsmith, his sentences limning his characters' vulnerabilities, with visuals that tick a reader's pulse." --Minneapolis Star Tribune

"Hallberg writes from a place of keen emotional perception." --Interview Magazine

"Genuinely moving . . . Hallberg's writing has an infinite quality . . . This is richly pictorial writing that lends itself to novelistic world-building." --Literary Review

"A blazing novel . . . Ottessa Moshfegh's My Year of Rest and Relaxation wrote contemporary addiction for the auto-satirically rich, and Barbara Kingsolver's Demon Copperhead wrote it for the economically oppressed. The Second Coming is a novel of the addicted middle . . . Words are not just a means to the story, but an end in themselves, ignited for the sake of seeing how they burn. And over 600 pages they burn wondrously." --Times Literary Supplement

"Garth Risk Hallberg's great gift is his ability to translate epic themes into intensely intimate, cumulatively powerful novels. Full of tension and emotion and populated by vivid characters and ideas, The Second Coming builds word by word to capture the intricacies of life while revealing its own breathtaking scope. This is a world you can fully enter and explore--one that resembles our own while expanding our understanding of who we are." --Christina Baker Kline, author of #1 New York Times best seller Orphan Train

"Beautifully alive . . . Verbal pleasures are to be had on every page." --Financial Times

"At its core, this is a tale of the love that makes a family and how it does so." --Booklist (starred review)

"A portrait of a daughter in crisis and a father in need of redemption, Garth Risk Hallberg's The Second Coming is a powerful statement about the clarifying sense of purpose to be found in parental love, and how we demand more of ourselves for the sake of our children. Hallberg's Ethan is a fascinating study in whether a certain kind of arrested American male, consumed early on by purposelessness and addiction, can in fact have a second act, even if his first is still, somehow, belatedly, being written, and not entirely by him." --Matthew Thomas, author of We Are Not Ourselves

"Garth Risk Hallberg's The Second Coming is a sprawling, aching, ultimately hopeful account of a father's love for a daughter and a daughter's defiance of that love when all too often it manifests as dysfunction. Hallberg deals with the dilemma of parental inheritance with a light touch, and the grace that finally descends on the Aspern clan is not only transformative but triumphant." --Joshua Ferris, author of Then We Came to the End

"Tremendous storytelling." --i news (Best New Books, July)

"A bravura performance." --Mail on Sunday (Ireland)

About the Author

GARTH RISK HALLBERG's first novel, City on Fire, was a New York Times and international bestseller and was selected as one of the best books of 2015 by The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, The Wall Street Journal, NPR, and Vogue. It was the basis for the Apple TV+ series of the same name. He is also the author of the novella A Field Guide to the North American Family. In 2017, Granta named him one of the Best of Young American Novelists. His work has been translated into seventeen languages.